Poetry Magazine, Elizabeth Ray Gargano, October 2000

Poetry Magazine

Elizabeth Ray Gargano

USA

erg5h@cms.mail.virginia.edu

Elizabeth Gargano has published poetry in Prairie Schooner, Poem, Sing Heavenly Muse!, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and Northeast Journal. Her fiction has appeared in Iris, Women's Words, The Long Story, and The Willow Review. She has received a Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She lives with her husband and son in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

SCREEN MEMORY
	--screen memory: a composite memory of events 
		experienced over and over

You are smaller than you can now imagine,
your head just reaching the scrolled arm of the couch,
slick white brocade, pierced with metal studs
drilled in mahogany. The couch looms in this cramped
apartment of early marriage, still called the "barracks"
after departed soldiers. After the war, your father's gone
all day. Your mother greets him like a hero
with coffee and kisses afternoons at five. 
She picked up the couch cheap at an all-day auction.
It was meant as a symbol of the home to come,
comfortable, heavy, a destination possible to anyone.
On the faded brocade, tiny gold trees, apple trees
hold out fertile branches, straining to touch.
The couch is high and padded. You can hide behind it, 
easily, though you have no need to hide,
being unseen.  Your sister and mother are screaming,
not for or about anything, but in the pure harmony 
of certainty, in the arms of the scream itself.
At eight, your sister is already beautiful,
her skin ivory. Her hair burns red.
The way she gives herself to the scream
is a dance, her spine still, arms swaying
head working high then low like a piston,
the stamp of her feet like the stamp 
of your mother's feet. What strikes you
is how they look alike. What strikes you
is their great love for each other.
And though you are too young to understand 
how you will watch this scene over and over
for the twenty years it will take you to leave home,
how rage will be their secret language,
one you will never learn to translate,
you'd like to dance too. You shuffle your feet
in a fake two-step of solidarity, but some fear
stops you because this dance, this love, is perilous. 
Some movement of the air can burn you as it burns 
your sister, her white cheek scalded by more than a slap,
by the pulse of her own young hatred and love.
To be beautiful might mean to be burned, and so
after your sister is sent to one bedroom
and your mother lies down again, locked
in the other, you sit on the couch.
You can't believe the silence
that blows in now like a hot desert wind
across stillness and emptiness,
across this field of a thousand harvests,
this orchard, white and gold.

[previously published in The Pittsburgh Quarterly]

WE HAVE PLANS

My sister's is to run away
before adulthood catches her
and live in a golden haze 
of rebellion and free love.
Mine is to answer correctly
a daisy chain of questions,
test my way out of here.
More than the stars
edging their faint lace
through December twilight,
I believe in her beauty:
her slim white neck,
her red hair that a foolish
boy has compared to fall leaves.
The cold world doesn't daunt us.
Our house with its close heat
its smell of burning and dust
looms near. Inside, our mother
lies on the living room floor
her toes aimed at the ceiling,
exercising her tipped womb.
It's not her fault
that her daughters are ungrateful,
that her womb has tilted out of orbit
that her fear for us burns
like a sun. The steep sidewalk
slants its ladder up through dusk.
We climb slowly. On Mrs. Salvatore's 
scrap of grass, a garden Mary,
her blue robe tufted with snow,
prays for us. Icicles weep
from her pitched hands.

[previously published in The Pittsburgh Quarterly]

SAFE AS HOUSES

I'm not talking about the lost country
of my childhood anymore, the grass
glowing like neon in rain,
the white-cheeked children waiting
for a bus home as the houses went up
in dusk. Chimney smoke drifted like a candle
extinguished. I held up a crescent-moon
thumbnail, snuffed out our house.

I'm not listening to the old voices,
monotonously sweet, the chatter
more like music than words,
the harmonious clatter of knives 
sinking as my mother lifted her hands, 
soap-starred from the dishpan. 
With a rake, my father combed the lawn 
for leaves and burned his catch.

The dinner hour rang like a bell 
and harvested us into conversations 
in yellowing rooms. We passed the bread, 
our hands spelling out 
"hunger, patience, eat, don't,"
and the rooms were always
about to speak, and through this silence,
they swallowed and closed their mouths.

THE HEAVEN OF THE STATIONS

Tonight I ride home
through the cindertowns of memory,
the train creaking sweetly 
along the curves.
Above the used car lot, 
the inverted flames of silver 
pennants shiver in wind. 
Row houses poke out 
dwarf porches proudly. 
At Miraculous Medal Church,
the signs beckon me: 
"Ash Wednesday Lenten Fish Fry," 
"Bingo Tonight."

There was always room 
for games and ashes.
Coal smoke perfumed 
each Saturday night
as we wandered in packs. 
Chimneys perched like doves 
in feathers of gray snow.
Even the stars wore their gritty 
haloes. So beautiful, 
the night held us still.

Now I can't stop moving. 
I just glimpse the oven-brown 
night outside the window,
just glimpse the old stations: 
Dorchester, Saint Anne, Perdue. 
Jolted over the same tracks,
I can't believe my luck.

ELEGY FOR MY FATHER

When I say, "It'll be all right,"
you shake your head
on the crackling hospital pillow,
refusing my lie.
The nurses have disconnected
the tubes that fed you
oxygen and saline. You are free
to move. My mother and I 
hover on each side of you
like would-be angels.
Our words buzz around you, flies
your moving hand bats away.

Now it is late
and we are still here
on the creaking plastic-covered
chairs, our eyes 
on the red sockets
and buttons of light
that gleam like a broken mosaic
on the night-time wall
over your bed.

Now it is later
and we are still here.
We imagine you are sleeping,
resting as if for a journey,
but your eyes never close.

Once you look at us,
say in your murky voice:
"Why does it have to be?"
While we fumble
(not for words, for a position
to take up, something comforting)
the silence grows silent until
you say:
"I think 
	I can
	     anticipate
			the answer."
"Tell us," we say, but you won't.
Like a crafty teacher, 
you wait us out. "Because
that's the way it is?" we ask. "Because
it always was?" That's when 
you nod, awarding us the answer.
"That's right," you say. "Process."
"And now," you ask
in the voice that was 
yours years ago,
"How do you answer
this question. . ."

The nurse slips in
smoothes your wild white hair,
pokes the thermometer into your mouth.
It beeps. 
The question is gone, forgotten.
We never learn the question.